Saudi TV’s dangerous hit

Tash Ma Tash is a satirical comedy series, shown on state-owned Saudi television nightly during Ramadan. It reflects the country’s problems of daily living, from the place of women to difficulties in the job market. Saudi clerics hate the show but it gets spectacular audience ratings.

by Pascal Ménoret

AN unusual demonstration disturbed Riyadh’s tranquillity early in Ramadan in December 2003. Before iftar (the meal that marks the end of the day’s fast), as a few cars sped down the deserted avenues, 40 people marched on the state television headquarters loudly demanding that a programme being broadcast be taken off the air. The programme was Tash Ma Tash (1), a famous series that has been shown every Ramadan night for the past 11 years. That night, the show was dealing with the issue of mihrims, the male guardians without whom Saudi women theoretically cannot do or say anything.

The two heroines of the episode were alone because the husband of one and brother of the other were in Paris for a few weeks. The women were harassed in parks, escorted out of shops and turned away from banks. They tried to regain freedom of movement by borrowing a senile grand father (a cure worse than the disease) and finally disguised the daughter of one and niece of the other as a little boy. Tash Ma Tash’s reputation has been built on exaggeration and clowning, poking fun at regional dialects and focusing sharply on the paradoxes of everyday life.This Saudi production is shown throughout the Arab world, but in the Arabian peninsula and Jordan it is a cult show and the streets empty when it is on.

That evening in Riyadh not everyone was pleased with its challenge to Saudi society, posed through women, Saudi society’s most symbolic yet invisible elements. The demonstration would have been unthinkable in the West, where television induces passivity rather than rebellion; in Riyadh a few people decided to give the street a voice. But television did not heed their call and the demonstrators returned to their homes.

The incident said much about Saudi television and relations between society and state television, a department of the ministry of information, always suspected of siding with the regime and against the people. The two state-owned channels long reigned unchallenged over an audiovisual desert, but in 1990, after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, which Saudi media ignored for days, everyone stopped pretending: people, furious at the media betrayal, repudiated the state channels, calling them Kazzaba al-ula and Kazzaba al- thaniya (Liars 1 and 2).

Since the Qatari satellite channel Al Jazeera appeared, Saudi state television has had a hard time regaining its market share. Its most recent attempts were the launch in 2003 of a sports channel and the 24-hour news channel Al Ikhbariyya, both broadcast by satellite. This is an admission that although satellite dishes have been prohibited in official fatwas, they are now part of daily life for Saudi Arabia’s 23 million inhabitants, contributing to the birth of public and political opinion (2). The variety of religious programmes on Al Jazeera, Abu Dhabi TV and Sharjah have also helped diversify religious practises and representations and in a way “de-Wahhabise” Saudi Islam.
Tash Ma Tash, launched in 1993, was meant to help revamp public television. It seems to have achieved that and the Saudi establishment praises it. The head of the ministry of education’s central administration notes: “Households have all abandoned satellite channels, despite their efforts to be creative during Ramadan, and are gathered around our national television, waiting for the time when Tash Ma Tash comes on.” Every year Saudi daily newspapers devote pages to comment on its latest episodes.

The two men behind the programme, Abdallah al-Sudhan and Nasser al-Qassabi, never dreamt this would happen. They were involved in satirical theatre at university, where they were studying for diplomas in agricultural engineering, and quickly abandoned their bland bureaucratic careers to write television screenplays. In the early 1990s they presented a proposal for a Ramadan programme to Ali al-Sha’ir, then minister of information. Three years later Tash Ma Tash was born. The writers announced their intention to “criticise social customs, traditions, administrative procedures and political habits”.

From religious puritanism to discrimination against women, chauvinism in culture or sports, administrative corruption, state bureaucracy, police mistakes or remnants of tribalism, nothing escaped them. Well, almost nothing: the royal family and its foreign policy were carefully avoided. But al-Sudhan and al-Qassabi did not spare bourgeois hypocrites, machos with complexes, westernised teens or even the clergy.

In one episode women were masters in their homes, while the men raised the children and did the housework. In another, two mischievous elderly men abandoned decency and outdid each other to win the favours of an aged beauty. They wrote about the way the Riyadh attacks and armed activism threw intelligence officers into a panic, causing them to make a series of mistakes; they denounced the recruitment of young Islamists and declared, in politically correct terms, that political opposition could lead to the murder of innocents. Actresses appeared on the show unveiled for the first time in 1996.

State television had vetoed the series until the arrival of a new minister, Ali al-Farisi, who lifted the ban. In 2000 Tash Ma Tash’s anti-religious jibes earned it a condemnation from the permanent committee of Grand Ulema, the state clergy’s highest institution. Again, the government overrode opposition and the minister of information confirmed the status quo. Provoking the religious establishment was acceptable; endangering Tash Ma Tash’s record ratings was not.

A Riyadh sociologist explains the impunity the series enjoys: “Tash Ma Tash is a critique from the margins and is tolerated because it’s light and funny. Each episode has a message, which sometimes needs decoding because it is not necessarily stated at the end. The critique is subtle. At the same time, the programme doesn’t challenge the system: we are dealing with a social critique within the existing social framework. The series remains within that framework when dealing with political themes like administrative corruption.” Because it is silent about the system’s deepest failings, Tash Ma Tash has somehow received the minister of information’s protection.

Abdallah al-Sudhan is grateful: “We are a private, independent enterprise, but we go along with state television, which has guarded us against donkeys and cretins.” He means men of religion, such as those who demonstrated in 2003, or Nasser al-Umar, a dissident sheikh who chimed in with the official ulema’s condemnation. Tash Ma Tash’s creators also know how to give credit to those who despise them: “It’s possible to measure its success by the fact that young university students, in certain religious circles, have written articles against the programme and sought to ban it in the name of religion.”

Not everyone likes such open criticism of religion and its social influence, and not only because they are puritans. “To turn the clerics into narrow-minded, flea-ridden extremists means to ignore that, in our country, hundreds of men of religion are physicians, engineers or university professors and have received a perfect education at national and international levels,” protests Mohammed al-Hudayf, a former member of the 1991 Islamist opposition. He goes so far as to call for the “protection of minorities against stigmat isation by the media”- admitting that, even in Saudi Arabia, the religious sector of society is no more than a minority requiring protection.

Others complain that the series mocks regional identities, especially through the remarkable imitation of dialects. “A man from the south or from the Hejaz won’t identify with these caricatures, which correspond to the way the inhabitants of Najd [the province where the capital, Riyadh, lies] imagine provincial Saudis,” says a linguist from Jeddah University.

Some observers underline the objective complicity between Tash Ma Tash and conservative elites. Mohammed Abbas, the literary critic of the newspaper Al Riyadh, writes that the series “leads us to this sad truth: reality is a big joke that we have all helped tell, but that we have neither the right nor the power to change. We have only the right to watch the actors playing out our mistakes, and to hear our own voices through theirs.”

It would be excessive to present Tash Ma Tash as official propaganda: even if some episodes show government mega-projects, like the fight against bureaucratic corruption or pro-Saudi employment measures, as flawless, the intent is different.

“The greater its misfortunes, the harder a given society laughs,” writes Mohammed al-Abbas: by depicting Saudi ills, this show is a social welfare project. Its many critics reveal how vital are the debates in a country long believed to be monolithic and mute.